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The New Technologies of Scent and the Future of Food & Health

Of all our senses, the sense of smell is probably the least studied and appreciated. However, in recent years our scientific understanding of how we perceive scents and what they do to our brains and immune systems has deepened. It turns out that scent accounts for around 80% of the experience of flavor, a dominant force in the experience and enjoyment of eating. We also are learning how scents clearly and directly affect our emotions. Some scents (even when you hardly perceive them) will pick you up and give you energy while others will help calm you down or take you to a remembered experience. Our deepening understanding has reached the point where a new wave of technologies is being developed by a new crop of startup companies that promise to make an impact on a range of industries from food and restaurants to health and wellness.

In this month’s What’s Now: New York event, done in partnership with Capgemini at their Applied Innovation Exchange, inventor David Edwards discussed the great power of scent in regaining memories for Alzheimer’s patients to increasing productivity during the work day. Edwards is a scientist and professor of the Practice of Idea Translation at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. He’s also the co-founder of three companies at various stages of development that all are working on different dimensions of the olfactory experience. At the event Edwards brought up the importance of scent in flavor and the way we process our surroundings. Since our bodies take in smells before we know it, we are constantly being bombarded by sensory stimulation even if we are not conscious of it. Scent affects our emotions in ways we don’t even understand yet, but Edwards is trying to change that. “We emotively process scent…before we process it cognitively,” said Edwards when referring to a smell’s power to infiltrate our emotions and memories without a conscious effort on our behalf.

Edwards demonstrated oNotes, a device he created with a student at Harvard that is linked to an app on your smartphone. By tuning the device to a specific scent profile, or playlist, you can create a mood, calm down or increase productivity just by pressing play. With hundreds of scents to choose from, including sun tan lotion and guava, oNotes doses your nose (and your brain) with a hit of calm or a call to action. oNotes has partnered with Lamborghini to improve driver wellbeing via playlists of scents. They are also working with multinational companies like Siemens to explore how employees can use oNotes in their personal workspace to improve performance, while management receives insight via aggregate digital scent behavior on stressful times and circumstances, and try to alleviate the cause. His latest company RetrO, has the potential to impact the health and wellness industry by using scents and flavors to replace the normal delivery of drugs through injection or ingestion. With collaborators in academia and industry, Edwards is building a clinical program to use these new scent technologies to develop this much less invasive approach to shaping human health.

With scent science and technology advancing, smells can be harnessed and given the power to reverse disease, improve quality of life and make working a happier experience.